Examples of a gesture input device include a glove or a bar device with an accelerator sensor or an infrared sensor, etc. Gestures or texts may be expressed using the above devices, and a robot or other systems can be controlled by the gesture input devices. Those input devices are called mediated interface devices since they transfer information between a person and a machine.
When any command is issued to the robot through the mediated interface device, the gesture expression is basically used. There may be the direction instruction, the emotion expression, or the text expression in the gesture. The motion of the robot may be controlled by the direction instruction, the current state of the user may be transmitted to the robot by the emotion expression, and the detailed command may be transmitted to the robot by the text expression. The gesture expressions may be appreciated by a gesture recognition technology, a text recognition technology, etc.
When the continuous text expression, that is, the word information is transmitted to the robot through the mediated interface, more semantic information can be transmitted to the robot than just transmitting a command of a single character. Then, the interaction between a person and a robot can be richer. However, different words from the intended ones may be input due to the errors of the sensors of the mediated interface device or the text recognition system. It would be preferable if the intended word can be recognized despite of the internal error of the mediated interface device or the system, which enables better interaction between the person and the robot.